


Bonemeal For The Garden

by Varynova



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bodily Alienation, Body Horror, Chronic Pain, Dissociation, Earth C, F/F, Gender Dysphoria, Genital dysphoria, Implied Sexual Content, Not Epilogue Compliant, Nudity, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Reference to Canon Abusive Caretaker, Reference to Canon Mind Control, Reference to Canon Temporary Character Death, Sadstuck, Suicidal Ideation, Trans Female Character, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-08 00:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21467029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varynova/pseuds/Varynova
Summary: When I gave up my body, my safety, and my identity for my friends, what else could I offer them except a smiling face?  When that wasn't enough, and they still left me alone, was there anything left inside me at all?As she fails to cope with a new life on Earth C, Jade seeks solace in the arms of another outsider.
Relationships: Jade Harley/Vriska Serket
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to [SamanthaStarbreaker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamanthaStarbreaker/works) for beta reading.

When I was 13, the universe hollowed me out and replaced my nerves with big green vines, all the way from the limbic center deep in my brain to the tips of my fingers and the ends of the tail and ears. I know it's true because they only burned a bit, unlike when it happened to her. She had no body, but when she came to consciousness again, she still screamed and cried as if she'd burst into flames. I know this, like I know how much it hurt, because I took her over and inherited her memories.

I became her, regrew her meat and slipped my toes into her legs like stockings. It barely hurt, just the slightest sting at the scars on my fingertips where the electricity and flame crackled and danced. Background noise in a body already buffeted with fresh, overwhelming sounds and smells. And sunlight.

My name is Jade Harley, and I have had a great deal of time to learn how to deal with the constant smothering of endless sensation, my private emerald sandstorm.

The doggy additions weren't by choice, but I learned to live with them eventually. I learned to coexist with the whining ghostdog in me, and his constant cravings for meat, scratches between the ears, and a moment's quiet underneath the noise. I made peace with the ears, and the tail, and the other, littler things; the offhand remarks about them never stop stinging, but the pain dulls with enough time and familiarity. Those parts of me may look strange, after all, but they're not the thing that makes me feel truly alone.

The vines were harder to get used to. I watched so many of my friends give their hearts so freely, as if offering themselves up wasn't the hardest thing they've ever done. They don't seem to live in terror of what it might do to them, if the people they trusted and loved shoved back against them, or refused to understand.

I can only imagine that if I came to trust someone, I would feel the deep green flow from my arms, running up the sides of the walls dividing us to bite into mortar and take root. Demolishing those barriers is a skill; it takes careful application of the belief that the object of your trust is only doing what they think is the right thing. It also takes refusing to overstep the hard edges outlining yourself, even when it feels like you have to out of desperate need.

But it would be so easy for me to just slip into their arms, try to dissolve into them. I can lose myself, buy into the foolish notion that they will not bite me like a mishandled viper. A snake never intends to harm the hand that seizes it, you see, but the venom jellies the veins and calcifies the heart regardless, so the damage is done without proper precaution.

I'll never have that happen, so I suppose I must be lucky. My tendrils wouldn't carry a poison like human veins, and if I have a heart at all, it doesn't need love to be fed, only a bit of water and exposure to the Sun. If you can stop people from getting close to you, after all, you can't be faced with that crushing sting, the bite of their good intentions still somehow infecting your bloodstream with their own disappointments or little failures. They can't change you with their misconceptions or shape you with their desires. It's an innoculant, of a sort I'm very familiar with; I don't think any other child in the history of forever has performed their own vaccines.

Love slithers, after all. I learned that many years ago; love moves low to the ground, either on its stomach like the snake or ripping through compacted soil like shoots of creeping ivy. That's how it breaks down barriers, sneaks its way into your chest, and inverts you from the ribcage out.

I learned to crawl on my belly, too, as a little baby. Becquerel interacted with me on my own level, in that playful way dogs do, lowering his body to the floor and dragging himself across carpeting and tile by his claws. I could never understand him, even when I learned everything he ever knew. But he never stood on his hindpaws, and as with all children my tragedy was that I outgrew him too quickly. I learned to walk, to speak, to read. I taught myself how to fire a gun, though I haven't done it since I was 13; there's no ear protection good enough in all the world.

I had to learn all by myself. My only friends existed a world away, or worse, across the boundaries of two universes and all of recorded time. Only when that distance collapsed did I learn how truly different I was from them, a feral child-- as the saying goes, raised by wolves.

My love wasn't enough to keep them together, to stop them from fighting, or falling apart. So I did what I learned as a little baby: I crawled on my belly. Like the dog I'd become, I rolled over. I smiled as big as I could, and I shrank down my needs so as not to burden them. It was how I could hold them together, keep them close to each other, even as I felt that vacancy gnaw my chest every day. I knew I could never be among them, and that was the price I'd pay so they could live the lives they wanted. Every day I wondered if they noticed.

I am not like them. The game made sure of that, squelched my form like play-doh in its hot little fist until I became the agent it needed, its perfect witch. I can still replay the sequence in my mind in slow motion, like a magical girl transformation in reverse, like a man becoming a slavering werewolf. Hairs sprouting at every extremity, my skull reshaping with sickening noise as the sloshing fluid of my inner ears boiled and split into four, my tailbone breaking to accomodate fresh and freakish bonegrowth. My legs bowing apart, like the punchline to the world's worst dirty joke.

I dreamt as a young, lonely child that I was an alien, dropped by meteor onto an isolated island to study humans at a distance, but never truly understand them. I suppose I never really evolved beyond that notion, even now that I'm twenty-one. The only thing that changed is that I learned about magic, and when it became clear that spells and incantations were as inviolable a domain as the sciences, I wondered if instead of an extraterrestrial mission I'd been saddled with a curse.

Five years ago, the threads of fate that held me aloft like puppetstrings slackened, let me flex my own muscles for the first time I could remember. My friends all fared better than I could with a new world, because they had spent the time forming connections, strengthening bonds, and learning how to love, while I was a forgotten stuffed animal in a cosmic toybox. They grew, basked in the sun, and I slept just beneath the permafrost.

Or... the strings of the puppet were the vines, and that's why I crawled... no. I'm having trouble even keeping any of it straight, or pulling apart the waking truths from the fantasy of metaphor. Even now the thoughts are all just a jumble, and all I can untangle from it are these feelings, those held by the discarded plaything, dormant seedlings of the perennial. I am unable to slither or vine, unable to trust or love. The feelings are all I have. That, and the dull, muscular soreness that recollection brings on. Still, without the Green Sun lurking in the corner of my vision, crackling and arcing as I sleep, I think I much prefer the little aches of memory to the tinnitic sear of blistered fingers. That is, except for the way it traps me now inside my own decaying corpse-- body, that is-- with no ability to fling my mind afar to gaze on the infinite cosmos.

If the boys were here, they'd tell me that I was dug too deep into self-pity, that I could clear my head and get my fingers dirty all at once, but now I know what they really wanted was for me to stop bothering them, even if they never said it out loud.

They got married, and I accepted that, because it was my duty to accept; they labeled the vestigial mailbox of our shared home with only their two names, and I didn't complain, because it was my duty to not complain.

I could almost even take the cracks about my body, the time I spent at 'interspecies raves', the way I was desperate to keep busy with gardening and decoration and travel. I knew that Dave was smart enough to recognize somebody coping with all the static that piles up. He knows what it's like when the tingling overloads into a panic that wraps itself around your midsection and squeezes. He had to know those things were my... counterstimulation. But when he wandered into the living room as I lay on the couch, and he started to whistle Hound Dog under his breath, likely without even noticing that he was doing it... I gathered my things that night. It was easy, because I never had my own room.

I haven't been back. It's funny to me, now, that when I had the choice between keeping up the story that it never hurt to be around him, or finding someplace else to live, I'd let him keep that precious illusion before I risked making him feel guilt for causing me pain. I crawled away from him on my belly so that he could keep his pride, and I smiled as I did it to not disturb his good mood. Then I told myself I would never crawl again, even if that meant going without love. I am the tin man, without heart; I am the lion, without courage.

Another friend married her wife. When I borrowed her overplumped couch-- as an excuse to avoid my darkened doorstep, where I knew not a soul waited for me-- she and I shared a solitary kiss.

But she turned away from me the next day, and said she could never do it again, and bade me to leave. And I understood, because it was my duty to understand. My roots retracted, my vines released. I don't know if I can survive without them, or if I will be simply an empty shell, but every day they rot, putrefying inside my arms.

I could have retreated to one house or another, like the abandoned one, which I'd claimed at the age of eighteen but never even fully moved into. But all that waited for me there was dust and disused furniture, with no seeds below the ground. I won't go back to that just for darkness and a queen-sized bed.

I could mope back to my sister, with my tail between my legs. She would give me a place to rest. But every time I awoke I would look into her eyes, and I would see her recollecting the two worst moments of our lives: the disappointment and loneliness she heaped on me with a sudden death on the Battleship, only barely explicable years later; or, worse, she sees in me the avaricious, green-crackling beast, who coated her fangs in blood in the thrall of another tyrant. Both our memories are hazy, but she told me once of the look in Rose's eyes as they sank and the blood drained from her face in her final moments.

June and Roxy are the only ones left who witnessed the worst of it, but I still see it in the way they look at me. I haven't spoken to my sister in a while.

I deluded myself, at 13, that I would always have the freedom to forget, to discard the rainbow ringlets on my fingers and neglect to feed the plants. I wish that were true, but memory is just as corrosive a venom as love. Half my life ago I wrapped myself in the warm blanket of little dreams, and one of those told me that no matter what, I would always be able to forget.

I wish I could. But I can't even dream anymore. I wonder: do I need sleep? Or food, vitamin D, or even water? I don't age. I can fly through space without air, without the negative pressure rupturing my capillaries and eyeballs like ripe tomatoes, and neither the infinite cold nor the surreal pull of emptied lungs wrings the consciousness from my body.

I wonder. Could I just walk into the ocean, take nonchalant steps until I wandered to the bottom? It might be a little cold, but so's space, and at least the water would be there to embrace me. Who was it who did that, some author? Rose would know. But then I guess I'm better off not asking. I'll keep sleeping, instead.

I sleep even more now than I used to, and I look forward to it more during the hours I spend awake. Saving all my friends used to drive me forward, keep my mind on the future and its immediate demands, and I didn't have a moment for all this maudlin pity or odious, indulgent regret. But now I have nobody to fill my time and no tasks to keep me occupied. All there is is the static, the nerve pain in my fingertips, the ocean in my ears. The vines have withered; the pumpkins have shrivelled, untended, and instead I have slept.

Maybe someday the meal from my bones will nourish my garden once again.


	2. Chapter 2

She plummeted to earth like the rest of us had, and I heard the peals of her manic laughter from a half-mile away as she scorched like a fireball down to the planet. I crawled out from the tangled foliage beneath the bush in which I'd spent the night, and stepped through a fold in space to stand at the site of her impact before she landed.

She fell out of the sky, and when I looked up all I could see was a tremendous scar, filled with black ink and the celestial cartography of a foreign universe. The fabric of our bubble had ripped, and each edge of the tear streamed with rainbow-hued cracks, practically shrieking in my sensitive ears the ghoulish noise of my former universe, worst among my captors.

Well, second worst.

The worst stood from the cracked earth, swiped her hand across her dustsmeared jeans and made a futile attempt to clean the dirt from a shirt stiff enough to stand up on its own. Cerulean symbol, mismatched horns, ashen skin tight to the bones of her angular face. Hair to her knees. Vriska Serket.

The woman who spent her childhood toying with me struck the earth like a thunderbolt, right in front of me. She had been the reason my friends couldn't trust me. She had pulled apart any semblance of trust I had in my body to do what I needed it to, like a monstrous child pulling the legs off of an insect to watch it writhe and squirm as the life oozes out of its thorax.

As she uncollapsed herself, checked for broken bones and shattered carapace, she gazed up into the same sky, drank in its torn meaning.

And she spoke, to no one in particular. It's over, huh. And she laughed, a wild, raucous, free laugh, as though she knew nobody was around anymore to force her backbone rigid and her claws sharp. Something in her changed, like a switch had been flipped, like the killer robot part of her had just peaceably exploded all on its own.

Then she turned and saw me, and her expression grew sour.

We had only met face to face the once. I doubted she even knew my name. And yet, despite all this, my first question was simply, why?

Her eyes watched my eyes. Perhaps what I saw flash through them was remorse, or perhaps the exhaustion of a life spent as a weapon of war finally caught up to her. She sighed, and tried to cover it with clenched teeth, hissing like a coiled snake.

She evaded, claimed ignorance, tried to leave. But I asked the more pointed question, one I knew she'd feel compelled to answer, because it offered the chance for flattery. I asked how she had benefited from it, what her plan had been, how it fit into her scheme.

She said, it hadn't. She had just wanted to see if she could.

I screamed at her for what felt like an entire day, spent the time delivering my pent up guts into her ears. Vriska insisted on regular breaks for tea, and changed her clothes; when I finished delivering a decade's pain and loneliness, she said she was glad to hear I was adjusting well to the new life.

I asked why she refused to scream back, and she smiled a crooked smile. She said it'd been too long since someone had yelled at her, and she missed it enough that she wanted me to finish, no matter how long it took or how winded I got. She said it meant she knew where she stood with me, and that put her at ease too much to want to argue.

Then she said she was moving into my home, because obviously nobody wanted to see her. I told her I had no home, so she told me to find one.

I took her to the empty house. I pulled the dustcloth from my old four-poster bedframe, tossed a mattress and some sheets onto it, and congratulated her on her new home. Then she asked where I actually lived, and I asked why she cared since she would clearly just dismiss me like another outgrown toy once I'd served my purpose to her.

She offered that I could share her bed. When I accepted, I surprised even myself. I've shared beds before, with people whose names I never knew or discarded instantly, but when she said it, it sounded less like a favor offered than a nonchalant fact, that I was a welcome guest instead of merely another benchwarmer among a churning crowd.

That night, I spoke to her for longer than I have any one person, ever before.

I asked how long she perceived the time between the end of the game and now to be. She shook her head. I asked how the intervening time had felt. She said, cold. I asked if she slept during it, dreamed; she said that if she did the former she couldn't recall it, and there was without a doubt none of the latter.

I shivered. She asked what I'd done since then. I thought for a while, trying to turn the story into one of biding my time, or of a fairytale yet to reach its ending.

I told her about how happy my friends were in their new lives.

She asked how long I'd been alone.

The briefest flicker of loathing sparked in my gut. How dare she try to lump that pity on me, like some sad, broken animal? Then I thought about the battleship, and the gaggle of consorts I'd corralled there to spend my infinite time with.

Back when they were my only company, I pitied them. They were static. They could never know what sadness truly meant, and worse, they could never know why that even mattered. But as Vriska spoke I realized that I would have fared no better with real company than they did. Maybe I was never built to withstand people, even as I needed them more than anything.

So all I said was, oh, a while.

I asked how she survived it. She shrugged, said that there wasn't much of a point to giving up, and without a reason to she refused to just die. So I asked if there was nothing else she could have done with the time instead, and she gave me a withering look. Then she asked if the same was true for me, and I cried again.

I slept fully-clothed that night, sneakers and all. I stared into the ceiling, and only when I heard her breathing slow, saw the tension drop from her gritted jaw and the lids of her eyes, did I roll away and close my own.

And then I had a dream.

I dreamt I stood in a vast field-- no sunlight, which suited me fine, no plants around, just fresh loam underneath my bare toes. I found a good spot, and I hunkered down, standing on my tippytoes as a coiled little ball, and put my fingers to the soil. They tore open with little black slits, splitting as the vines inside me became dark, woody roots, and sought subterranean water. That was good, I thought, because I was parched, so I tossed my head back to see if there was rain coming. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, just endless, vasty dark, and I closed my eyes to appreciate the smell of dry earth. My hair tumbled down my back in messy curls, and where the tips touched the ground they also spread into it, searching the thirsty dirt. And the bark curled around my toes, starting its long journey, up, up, up my trunk.

I couldn't tell where the screaming was coming from, though. I hoped it wasn't me, because I'd hate to bother anybody.

Then I woke up.

The next morning, I told Vriska about the dream, and found myself describing the ways my fingers ripped and my hair pulled me into the ground with nonchalance. She gawped as though I were oncoming headlights.

\--

That was a month ago.

We have learned a lot about each other in that time. We speak every day, as roommates do; we share a bed, as roommates do. Neither of us tidy the house or cook much, but at least we keep each other company.

I ask why she never went back to the rest of our friends, but invited me into her bed. She asks in reply if my only purpose in latching onto her so quickly was that I'd driven everyone else away. I drop it, and try to leave, but she stops me, apologizes. She says she doesn't know how to act around them without a purpose in life, and that I'm the only one who could ever truly know how that felt. She says she can't bring herself to fight anymore, to scream and claw the world into accepting her presence.

She's a newcomer to this world, dropped like a stone into a silent sea. She knows nobody here, not really, in her newfound adulthood. And none of them know her, though they bolt their doors when she approaches.

But that means she never had to watch me drift like jetsam as my friends departed for the happier shores of adulthood and adjustment. She never expected me to smile just to make her life easier. It sounds like such an abject cliche that we share our alienation, our mutual isolations, but perhaps she is the only person I relate to.

In that moment I realize the common thread that makes me sure I can get to know her. She and I are the only two things I have ever truly hated.

When I tell her this, she grins, showing every tooth, and asks if it's still the case even now. I confess that I lost the ability with so many years of numbness and apathy, and she takes my hands in her hands, and says she knows I'll get it back. And she leans forward, putting her head so close to mine, but blinks in hesitation. She knows what she wants, but acts as if asking for permission is too far outside the realm of possibility even as she's desperate to close the gap. So I tell her to kiss me, and she does.

\--

Vriska Serket is the first person I let touch my body in a year.

When she tries the first time, I am fully-clothed and lying in my bed. We've just been talking about why animals can do it-- be seen naked, be regarded as they are-- but we can't. Vriska asks why chimpanzees can't wear pants, and we laugh. But then I say I would like her to see me naked, and she asks if I'm sure. She says we've never even touched, apart from the kiss. And if we can't even hug how--

I tell her I want to.

Before she can even rest a finger on my torso, I crumple like discarded newspaper and bawl at her approach, limbs collapsing inward to involuntarily separate her from my core.

She asks if I would like her to stop. I beg her not to.

I force the air through my nose, resting both of my hands against her wrist. My legs unflex, and I extend them to the bed again, trying to suffuse them with a calm anathema to every burning image of scampering prey animals in my head.

She lowers it to me again, and her palm, cold and cracked like baked clay, falls flat on my shirt, right at the stomach.

I hold it there until the clenching pulse I feel tangling my innards ceases. And I breathe again, sighing through years of tension in a single breath.

Vriska breathes along with me.

I've let others try before, my aforementioned bedfellows. Maybe some even succeeded, but it doesn't mean I was really there when it happened. But this time is different.

I ask if she'd like to try it again with our clothes off. She smiles, says she absolutely would.

\--

Jade lies in the middle of the bed. Her body is on display, bare hips too wide, with that odd divot in the front that she can never get to fit into jeans just right; sprawled mess of hair, untameable, but that makes her cry every time she imagines someone cutting even an inch of it off. And as she gazes down on herself, sees every pockmark and scarred knee, she's not certain she even exists, or if an attempted touch would just fall right through her without the benefit of clothing. But Vriska dutifully watches Jade's eyes, and her hand contacts flesh as if Jade were real, and really there.

All Jade can think is, wow, I bet it'd be nifty to be the woman on the bed right now. She watches her head nod and hears herself say to keep going. But she's floating overhead, taking the time to count the power outlets and wonder about the bulbs in the lamps.

\--

When I find myself in my body again, Vriska has removed her clothing, aligned herself with my side to nestle her body along it. The static charge of her skin against mine is almost too much to bear, but even the newfound tingles subside as I wrap my arm underneath her head and she moves her hair. I cradle her against me, letting the curve of her cheek settle against the round of my shoulder, lips against my collarbone. She gazes down my body, taking me in.

She asks how somebody as needy as me can spend so much time doing things I don't want to be doing. I shrug, and tell her I've never thought about it, because who else would shoulder those tasks if I didn't.

She asks who would make sure I was fulfilled and could be happy if I didn't.

She asks how long I've had it. Since I was thirteen, I reply, and that she probably watched it happen. She opens her mouth, closes it again, and stares pointedly at the wall next to us.

She says she's had hers forever, and wonders how I ever got used to it. She remembers breaking so many mirrors that eventually she stopped replacing them, started smashing everything else instead. I say that it's easy when you remember your body isn't yours to play with, that the needs of others simply take priority at times, even when it hurts, and that when all you can do is watch, maybe it's best to accept whatever happens.

Vriska Serket cries on my shoulder. Drab, ugly blue tears run freely from her eyes, welling in the cleft of my sternum provided by my lumpy, oversized breasts. I pet her hair, stroking the top to not catch my hand in the tangles and knots. Even witnessing this feels profane, like the tormentor in my mind holds no resemblance to the weeping, vulnerable being in front of me. The monument carved by the horror stories I've been told crumbles. That's when I feel the vines inside me move again, for the first time since that dream, freeing me for a while from the silent ache in my gut and the tension in my throat.

I ask if she wants to talk about it. She doesn't, for now. Eventually I learn more about her past, the men and monsters who used her body for their amusement too. She'll tell me about wrestling her own arm to stop it from striking her, feeling the nerves connected to both limbs burning as she loses a fight against her mechanical parts at the cost of her dignity. She'll tell me about being chided into so many avoidable failures and slaughters by the awful, cueballheaded man, who got everything he ever wanted and never faced a single setback, and for whom death was much too good an ending; and of her beastly spider, who screamed into her mind daily that she would face a much grislier fate than her prey if she failed to entrap enough young bodies for its meals. And how it made her watch its grisly mastications every day just to remind her of that fact. I wish I could hurl them all into the sun, and I hold her so tightly.

She'll tell me exactly how bad her dysphoria gets. I can't claim to have lived through exactly the same, but I try to soothe her in any way I can, and share my own stories when I can't. I'll learn that when I talk about piercing my own ears, sizing my own bras, flattering or hiding my own body with skirts, she relaxes a little bit, and sighs less with pain and more with the soft glow of recognition.

She'll tell me how she truly, truly expected to die, that day, in a heroic blaze against our universe's most hated foe. And that when she didn't, she found herself with no direction, no purpose, no point.

But for now, she has my warmth, and I pull the thick covers over both of us, satisfied to bulwark her from the world as she shivers and sobs.

I wish she could meet Bec.

\--

Grief is a strange animal. It lies on your chest, curls up around you, but after you get used to the weight you're not sure what else could tether you to the earth if it left you. Almost like without it, everything just floats, and while you could push yourself from obligation to obligation, at some point you know you'll just become stranded, motionless, with nothing to push off from. So your options are to clutch yourself close to everyone nearby, so they can depart from you to avoid their own intertia; or to weight your body down with a lifetime's memories.

It's possible my mistake was in having such a bad life to begin with, or maybe becoming too comfortable with the weight of grief around my neck. But now, beside me in this bed is a blue girl, her chest rising and falling in time with each rattling breeze through the pines outside. I know for the first time that I won't have to crawl for her approval, and already I feel the vines strengthening again, tearing through the cynical barriers between us. And this, unlike so many things, can't be a mistake.

While she's here with me, I have no regrets, none at all.

\--

The next morning, I awaken before the dawn with the intent to finally clear out the dead flowerbeds out front, choked with creeping charlie. Vriska is still asleep, next to me, and barely whines with the creak of the antique bedframe as I slip out. When I come back inside, she's wrestling desperately with the coffee maker, and the resulting process chokes even me with its bitter diesel ichor. But we sit together, there on the little porch, and watch the sun peek through thick clouds to illuminate my hopeful patch of dirt.


End file.
